Design mediates so much of our realities and has tremendous impact on our lives, yet very few of us participate in design processes. In particular, the people who are most adversely affected by design decisions—about visual culture, new technologies, the planning of our communities, or the structure of our political and economic systems—tend to have the least influence on those decisions and how they are made..d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }1zirui dengDesign justice rethinks design processes, centers people who are normally marginalized by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face..d-undefined, .lh-undefined { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) !important; }1Alazar Mengistu

While user studies can tell you a lot about the usability problems in your interface and help you identify incremental improvements to your design, they can’t identify fundamental flaws and they can’t tell you whether your design is useful. This is because you define the tasks. If no one wants to complete those tasks in real life, or there are conditions that change the nature of those tasks in real life, your user study results will not reveal those things. The only way to find out if something would actually be used is to implement your design and give it to people to see if it offers real value (you’d know, because they wouldn’t want you to take it away).

Consistency and standards is the idea that designs should minimize how many new concepts users have to learn to successfully use the interface. A good example of this is Apple’s Mac OS operating system, which almost mandates that every application support a small set of universal keyboard shortcuts, including for closing a window, closing an application, saving, printing, copying, pasting, undoing, etc. Other operating systems often leave these keyboard shortcut mappings to individual application designers, leaving users to have to relearn a new shortcut for every application.

Some design scholars are skeptical about human-centered design because they don’t believe modeling and verifying people’s needs through a few focused encounters is sufficient to actually address people’s problems, or systems of activities1212 Norman, D. A. (2005). Human-centered design considered harmful. ACM interactions. . These and other critiques lead to a notion of participatory design 1010 Muller, M. J., & Kuhn, S. (1993). Participatory design. Communications of the ACM. , in which designers not only try to understand the problems of stakeholders, but recruiting stakeholders onto the design team as full participants of a design process